


Hogsmeade University

by starling



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 16:37:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15100787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starling/pseuds/starling
Summary: Recently found this, written I think in 2013. The Marauders transposed to a British university, an initial chapter that I never worked on so it doesn't really go anywhere but I wanted to post it anyway. Remus/Sirius and Remus/Tonks. It's about British first years so obviously a bit of a mess.





	Hogsmeade University

Gryffindor College was the oldest and most run-down of the colleges in Hogsmeade University, which itself was a fairly run-down place. It wasn’t quite old enough to be ruined or stately; it was just… messy. Slytherin had ensuite bathrooms and the biggest JCR with a huge TV, Hufflepuff had sofas in the kitchens and no fewer than four college bars, Ravenclaw was right next to the 24-hour-library. Gryffindor? Gryffindor had soul. 

 

There was something about the ratty carpet, the faint scent of weed, and the asbestos-ridden ceilings that really brought people together. There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other.

 

These thoughts were some faint comfort to Remus, who had just finished unpacking and trying to paper over the cracks in his wallpaper with a set of tasteful art prints. The room was finally homely, in an overpowering-smell-of-furniture-polish kind of way. He pocketed his key, left Room 63 and walked down the corridor, ready to meet his new housemates.

 

Room 64, the first door he knocked on, there was no reply. Room 65, a wobbly male voice called out, “In a minute!” Remus was worried he’d interrupted something, but within a few seconds the door had been opened by a small boy with wide glasses, prominent front teeth and short ginger hair. 

 

“Hi,” Remus opened. “I live down the corridor.” Smooth.

“Hullo,” replied the boy, “I’m Peter. This is my room.” No shit. Remus felt better already. 

Peter invited him in, and within a few minutes of hanging out on the floor together, they were firm friends, swapping impressions on the building, the lake, their backgrounds, each competing somewhat uncharacteristically to be friendlier, more enthusiastic. Remus got the feeling they both left a lot out. The bar was low, but Peter soared over it.

 

Then came another knock at the door. “It’s open!” Peter called out, and a whirlwind entered the room in the form of two teenage boys with dark hair. 

“Hi-I’m-James-and-this-is-Sirius,” one of them rattled off as he bounced into the room, his mop of hair nearly covering his glasses. “Oh these are interesting books!” he said, rifling through Peter’s bookshelf. “You like Terry Pratchett?”

 

“Love him,” Peter replied, grinning. “I’m Peter, if you were wondering.”

 

“What’s your name?” asked the second boy, Sirius, and Remus told him. Sirius was gorgeous, in a floppy-haired boyband kind of way. He kept having to push it out of the way, which looked terribly impractical.

“Nice to meet you, Remus; James and I live downstairs. An extremely beautiful girl from the third floor has invited us to a pub quiz in half an hour, do you want to join us?”

“Sure.”

 

They lost the quiz, spectacularly. Sirius got extremely drunk and spilled Lily’s pint everywhere with his wild gesticulations, rendering their answers unreadable. Peter was even more drunk, as tiny as he was, and had to be silenced from calling out their answers loud enough for the other teams to overhear. Lily went to change into a clean skirt and never came back. Remus didn’t blame her at all, but James was inconsolable and had to be detained from trying to follow her. Soon she was forgotten, and the four of them slipped into an already-comfortable pattern. Remus managed to tell an anecdote about kissing Mark in the locker room, and the nonchalant response left him secretly elated.

From then on, it was so easy. Remus, Peter, James and Sirius were inseparable. Remus could never quite tell why James and Sirius had chosen the two of them to befriend – in fact he could never quite tell if it was a choice, or they’d simply been in the right place at the right time. But regardless, the four of them it was, and the four of them it would be.

One simple Saturday, in late October, and the four boys had gone for lunch at The Kitchen, one of the bars in Hufflepuff College, between lectures. Halfway through a chocolate brownie, Remus had an thought.

 

“James and Peter are pretty normal names,” he said.

 

“There were four Jameses in my year at school,” James replied emphatically. “Dull as dishwater.”

 

“And my mother studied Classics, which is why I’m called Remus,” Remus continued.

 

“Wasn’t Remus the one who died horribly, and didn’t found Rome?” Peter asked.

 

“Parents didn’t want to get his hopes up,” James replied. “Rome’s already been found, it’s in Italy.”

“Coming to on to the point,” Remus pressed on, turning to Sirius. “I was wondering what’s going on with Sirius. Are your family weird like mine?”

 

Sirius shrugged. “My grandma was really into astronomy. I’ve got a cousin called Andromeda. Is anyone going to the 20s thing on Saturday?”

Sirius followed this pattern, of casual responses followed by immediate subject changes, every time he was asked about his family. The one exception was a story he told on the way home from a night out, about a teenage neighbour who he used to flirt with - it started as an amusing anecdote about how this girl’s friends used to joke that he wasn’t real since they’d never met him, and she eventually livestreamed their date to prove he existed - it ended with his parents discovering he’d had a girlfriend who wasn’t white and grounding him for a month. And Remus was absolutely staggered, that Sirius could tell this story with James right there and pretend that was a minor part of the story. Sirius’s parents were clearly just… the worst.

Over the course of the year, it emerged that the boys Remus had fallen in with were all fairly well-off. Peter’s father was an accountant, James’s family owned a summer home in Italy, Sirius’s family were posh in a truly terrifying way. Remus’s parents didn’t have a lot of money – his father, rather, didn’t have a lot of money; his mother had died when he was young, gifting him a ridiculous name and little else. When the others wanted to go to the cinema, Remus occasionally had to pretend to be busy. But he was happy; really, truly, happy.

“You should come on holiday with my family,” James poked Sirius in the side one day. “We go to the same place every year, it’s beautiful and deathly dull, especially in the winter. It’d be better to have a week-long sleepover - we’ll share a room, get drunk, watch movies, play gay chicken.”

 

“I will win that,” Sirius responded, absolutely deadpan.

 

“I don’t know, I mean – oh, I see.” The penny dropped and Sirius burst out laughing. “Cool.”

Sirius went on the holiday with James, the Lake District somewhere. Remus stayed in Hogsmeade over the summer, working in Flourish and Blotts, apart from a flyby trip to see his parents for Christmas. Peter went back to his hometown to break up with his girlfriend in person and came back to Hogsmeade when it became clear his school friends had all taken her side.

By New Year’s Eve, all four boys were back in Hogsmeade. 

Remus was drunk, so he was thinking about Sirius. He was thinking about how James and Sirius were always inseparable, always the best of friends. Sometimes Remus felt that he and Peter were just in their orbit, fortunate just to be witnesses. Nobody else saw it that way, but Remus couldn’t get the metaphor out of his head. 

And then, suddenly, at midnight in a club with sticky floors, Remus was kissing Sirius. And - even more shockingly - Sirius was kissing him back. 

“You know I’m bisexual, right?” Remus slurred, even though he wasn’t sure how Sirius could have missed it now. 

 

“Same,” Sirius replied. “So goddamn bisexual, I never want to kiss a girl again. Boys-sexual,” he continued, not quite laughing but smiling as if he wanted Remus to laugh first.

 

Remus laughed. “That’s not what that means.”

 

“Shut up,” Sirius said, and kissed him again.

And then the next morning, Remus woke up with a hangover and - precious little else. A perfect memory, that he had no idea what to do with. Sirius didn’t mention it, so Remus didn’t mention it. It was reduced to a quiet, strange little ache. Nothing he couldn’t handle.

A couple of weeks later, Peter convinced him to get Tinder and the two of them were exchanging strategies. Peter swiped right on every girl, Remus opened the app and stared at people, trying to work out what he didn’t like about them, and closed the app again.

In February he took the plunge, and met a series of men and women who felt like a waste of time until he met Tonks, who didn’t. Peter got on the college football team, through what could only be described as an act of God when food poisoning struck the users of Gryffindor canteen on the day of try-outs. James brought Lily toast twice a day until she stopped vomiting, and much as Sirius mocked him, it paid off. Life continued happily.

(It was a bit weird, for Remus to realise that Sirius and Tonks were related. Okay, it was a lot weird. But honestly, it could have been worse. It was one kiss.)


End file.
